Re-Envisioning Global Development

A Horizontal Perspective

Sandra Halperin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135928049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Re-Envisioning Global Development offers an original conceptualisation of capitalist development from its origins to the present day.

Most approaches to understanding contemporary development assume that industrial capitalism was achieved through a process of nationally organised economic growth, and that in recent years its organisation has become increasingly trans-local or global. However, Halperin shows that nationally organised economic growth has rarely been the case – it has only recently come to characterise a few countries and for only a few decades.

This innovative text elaborates an alternative ontology and way of thinking about global development during the last two centuries – one linked, not to nations and regions, but to a set of essentially trans-national relations and connections. It argues that capitalist development has, everywhere and from the start, involved—not whole nations or societies–but only sectors or geographical areas within states. By bringing this aspect of historically 'normal' capitalist development into clearer focus, the book clarifies the specific conditions and circumstances that enabled European economies to pursue a more broad-based development following World War II, and what prevented a similar outcome in the contemporary 'third world'. It also clarifies the nature, spatial extent, and circumstances of current globalising trends.

Wide-ranging and provocative, this book is required reading for advanced level students and scholars in development studies, development economics and political science.

1

Global development

Introduction: The ‘Victorian Edifice’ of conventional European historiography

This is an inquiry into the nature and causes of ‘global development’. ‘Global development’ refers to social changes across large areas of the world which appear to be linked to interactions and connections among different regions of the globe and to follow rhythms and flow from broadly similar causal foundations. This book describes its nature as reflecting a horizontal set of connections, relations and processes among elites and wealth-owners around the world; it explains its causation as located in a recurring social logic of elite reproduction.

The study of global change is not new. A global vision is evident in the work of Herodotus. It can be seen throughout the centuries in the striving of scholars to identify broad patterns of human development across cultures and within the whole record of human achievements. However, there was a critical point in the more recent past at which ‘we seem to have taken a wrong turn’ in our understanding of global development. That point, as Eric Wolf has noted, is identifiable: it occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the varieties of human experience were conceptualized as taking place within ‘separate, narrowly-conceived spheres of social action’ (Wolf 1982: 7), and in a world divided into separate, culturally distinctive, nationally bounded societies.¹

While nineteenth-century social scientists were developing these analytic conventions (which became, in the twentieth century, the basis for social science disciplines and inquiry), they were also at work producing what the historian William McNeill calls the ‘Victorian Edifice’ of conventional European historiography (McNeill 1974: 3).² This involved a writing project whose purpose, it would seem, was to refashion then-popular ideologies of Western superiority and progress in Europe into a durable and imposing historiographic tradition. The historiographic edifice that emerged was structured around a central theme: how the rise of Europe and the birth of modernity defined a radical disjuncture and discontinuity in world history.

As McNeill notes, the inspiring tale of European modernity and human progress that it told ceased to be convincing after the horrors of World War I. However, beginning in the 1950s, theorists of ‘development’ in the United States, working within its basic structures but with new techniques and generous funding from the United States government (see Chapter 7), refurbished the edifice to highlight capitalism and nation states as key features of western modernity and the goal towards which all humankind was moving.³

Before the Victorian Edifice came to dominate historical thinking, European observers had written prolifically about what they had considered to be the most characteristic aspects of their time: domination, exploitation, uneven development, inequality, political instability, and authoritarianism. These had been the principal foci of the narratives and analyses of countless social scientists and reformers; the speeches, official documents and reports, and other writings of European statesmen; and the work of Europe’s greatest literary figures.

Processes of capitalist development and the consolidation of nation states had cast large numbers of Europeans and other populations into an ‘abyss of human degradation’, as Karl Polanyi so compellingly phrased it (Polanyi 1944: 39) and as so many records of the time had convincingly shown. These processes had culminated in two global wars and, in a further extension of industrial technology, the extermination of millions of people in a truly modern, European ‘holocaust’. But in the historical accounts that became the basis of theories of development, all these aspects of Europe’s development, all the elements that for European observers had revealed its intrinsic costs and engendered pessimism and doubt about capitalism and industrialization,⁴ recede into the background. Instead, industrial capitalism is depicted as steadily diffusing wealth, and gradually, but inevitably, spreading equality and liberty into increasingly wider domains. It is a reassuring tale of progress unimpeded by power and privilege, suffering, division, and struggle.⁵

Refurbished to serve as housing for the story of capitalist development, the Edifice survived. It was still standing in 1974 when, with a touch of incredulity, William McNeill noted that, despite its ‘leaky’ roof and ‘deplorable’ plumbing it continued to give shape to what we chose to emphasize ‘amidst all the buzzing confusion’ of the past.⁶ Some 40 years after McNeill wrote those words and despite the growing number of scholars who reject its euro-centrism and themes of disjuncture and discontinuity, and who seek to re-centre global history on interactions and encounters in which humanity as a whole participated, the Edifice still stands.⁷ Recent decades have produced an array of neo-Marxist and world systems, post-colonial and subaltern perspectives on global development; and rich histories of the world and of its different regions explored in a global context. But the Edifice still stands, obstructing our vision of the global terrain and distorting our apprehension of its basic contours. McNeill suggests that the Edifice endures because of ‘the absence of any alternative housing’. Perhaps this is why, despite abundant evidence of its defects, we continue to toil away beneath its leaky roof. If so, what is needed is to break decisively with its assumptions and habits of thought, relocate to a different plot, and build on new foundations.

Much research and writing is concerned to do just this. But, because the national frame and other elements of the Victorian historiographic tradition have so significantly shaped existing sources, it is difficult to find in them the materials from which to develop an alternative ontology and history of the world. What we need, then, is a strategy that will enable us to do two things: to transcend this historiographic tradition and to develop a non-national ontology sturdy enough to support a global analysis of modern development.

This chapter suggests how elements drawn from existing development theories and recent research and writing on global history can be combined to produce a ‘gestalt shift’. What this shift enables us to see is a world in which the interactions of interdependent cities are ontologically primary, and national societies appear as secondary phenomena arising from and reflecting their properties.⁸ The modern world history it enables us to construct focuses not on Europe and highlights of ‘European history’, but on the emergence of dynamic focal points of growth throughout the world as a result of Afro-Eurasian and, eventually, global processes of interaction and expansion, and the urban-based system of networks that these produced and through which capitalism and processes of industrial production develop.

This chapter first highlights some weaknesses of the Victorian edifice – the ‘leaky roof’, the ‘deplorable plumbing’ (Section I). It then discusses efforts to repair these (Section II). Finally, it suggests how, rather than filing in gaps and repairing faults, we might build on new foundations (Section III).

I. Global development as western modernity: Foundation myths

Histories of the world written by nineteenth-century Europeans defined a radical contrast between Europe (the ‘West’) and Asia (the ‘East’),⁹ and characterized the rise of the ‘West’ as representing a disjuncture and discontinuity in world history. They described a Europe radically cut off from other cultures, and explained its rise as the result of dynamic developments within Europe itself: world-historical ‘revolutions’ in science and technology, agricultural and commercial practices, intellectual life, and social and political institutions. These advances enabled Europeans to navigate the oceans and, inspired by a spirit of discovery, to embark on a series of voyages that revealed a primitive and backward ‘new’ world (the Americas) to their west; and a now stagnant and dissolute ‘old’ one to their East. Europeans had found that when – as a result of – revolutions and discoveries – the ‘lights went on’ again in Europe (following what thereafter was to be called ‘the dark ages’), they had yet to come on in the lands to its west, and had long gone out in the world to its east.

This is a startlingly audacious fiction. When the ‘lights went on’ in Europe, they were, and had long been, shining brightly throughout the vast, prosperous Asian-based system of economic and cultural interconnection and exchange that, at that time, stretched from western and southern Europe through the Middle East to China; a system to which Europe was a mere ‘appendage’, struggling to find something to trade for the Moslem, Indian, and Chinese silks and other textiles, spices and aromatics, timber, metals, and ceramics that it coveted. In the sixteenth century, Europe’s exploits in the Americas gave it, for the first time, a range of goods for export to the east. With precious metals of the New World and ocean-going ships originally developed for their own coastal trade (and later used to search for a quicker, westward route to the riches of the East) Western Europeans began to seize control of the great highways of international exchange that linked this system together – analogous, as Gunder Frank pointed out, to the seizure by the Mongol hordes of the trade routes of the Silk Road in the thirteenth century (Frank 1998: 256).

Processes of global diffusion and integration moved, not from west to east, but from east to west. The West was born from within the East and long remained its child. Even after Europeans seized the prosperous trade routes, markets, and industries of the East, European developments – modes of production, urbanization, class structures, and systems of spatial exchange – continued to reflect developments elsewhere in the world. Europe’s coercive entry and eventual integration into Afro-Eurasian networks changed the scale and geography of exchange networks, but they did not destroy or displace them. Until well into the nineteenth century, the volume of exchanges continued to remain greatest in East Asia, with trade flows between Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Siamese, Javanese and Arabs remaining much greater than those within Europe, and Europe and the Americas playing a minor role overall, centred mainly on the triangular transatlantic trade.

European expansion

The rise of Europe was accompanied by the most destructive military expansion in human history. It continued the brutal and bloody expansion that had taken place in Europe itself during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, when a conquering military aristocracy from Western Europe established conquest states and colonial societies throughout the region. The establishment of these states and colonies, in Greece, Andalusia, Ulster, and Prussia, had been mythologized ‘as a founding moment and a defining breach in time’ between pre-conquest barbarism and post-conquest progress (Bartlett 1993: 92). This mythology of disjuncture and difference was used by those who settled in the newly conquered and colonized parts of Europe to invalidate pre-conquest legal and other claims to possessions and privileges, and to authorise a new definition of property rights in the conquered areas.

In the eleventh century, conquering Western European elites began to establish colonial bridgeheads and bastions outside of Europe. From the beginning of this European expansion, observers noted the conquerors’ appetite for domination and for ‘a new cruelty, brutality and bloodthirstiness’ (Bartlett 1993: 86).¹⁰ By the latter half of the eleventh century, a dense network of Italian trading and settlement was being developed by ‘aggressive merchants-cum-pirates-cum-crusaders’ trading in large ports (e.g., Constantinople and Alexandria), plundering (e.g. in al-Mahdiyyah in North Africa) or trying to establish crusading principalities (e.g., in Antioch and Lattakieh) (Bartlett 1993: 183).

By the sixteenth century, changes in the conduct of warfare and advances in military technology had enabled the European military expansion to extend into the lucrative Asian trade system. Europeans, using armed ships and through predatory acquisitions, established domination over societies that were more developed, technologically and institutionally, and more prosperous and ‘civilized’ than their own (Abu-Lughod 1989: 5). Portuguese men-of-war operated in the heartland of the Asian system, burning or boarding ships and confiscating the cargoes of indigenous and unarmed merchant fleets. Using the precious metals of the New World to invest in military organization, supplies, and shipping, Europe achieved by the end of the sixteenth century a worldwide military lead based on naval superiority.¹¹ As with European conquests in Europe itself, European conquests everywhere were mythologized as defining a dis-juncture between pre-conquest darkness and emptiness and post-conquest enlightenment and progress (Bartlett 1993: 86).¹² Europe had expanded into parts of the world that, in every area other than naval weaponry and brutality, were superior to itself. Its domination rested on military advantages rather than on deep structural differences. However, ideas of European cultural and intellectual superiority propounded to provide ideological support for this campaign of conquest and domination would eventually produce a profoundly erroneous representation of these encounters. A key element in this representation was the notion that European discoveries and revolutions had enabled Europeans to move to the centre of global development and to lay the foundations of its future progress.

The European discoveries

In order to maintain the notion that European domination was based, not on brutal conquest but on intellectual, cultural, and scientific superiority, the fiction developed that Europe had established domination over a dark and stagnant world. But what Europeans had actually discovered to their east were societies far in advance of the ones back home. They discovered in Islamic Andalusia a multiethnic, multilingual, religiously pluralistic state that fostered a culture of tolerance; and major centres both of commerce and culture in the Islamic cities of Constantinople, Alexandria, Cordoba, and Baghdad. These, at the time, were the largest cities in the world (along with Kaifeng, in China). They had paved streets, street lamps, sewage systems, freshwater systems provided by aqueducts, and businesses and stores that stayed open 24 hours a day (Menocal 2002). They discovered China, the world leader in technology, industry, and commerce, with thriving coal, steel, and armaments industries, and a market-regulated commerce carried out with massive sailing vessels (capable of carrying 1000 people) with pivoting sails and watertight compartments.

But these discoveries are not what the term ‘European discoveries’ alludes to in conventional European historiography. The term refers only to the ‘barbaric’ peoples to the west. Missing entirely is Europe’s discovery of the prosperous, sophisticated East.

European voyages of discovery occurred in ‘an age of travel, discovery, of geographical redefinition’ throughout Eurasia (Subrahmanyam 1997: 737). They were part of a broader Eurasian expansionism that included ‘the consolidation of Ming absolutism, the emergence of a new world power in the Ottoman Empire, the reunion of Iran under the Safavids, the rapid expansion of Islam into South East Asia, and the creation of a vast new Islamic Empire in North India (Darwins 2007:51). European historiography treats Europe’s discovery of a ‘New World’ to the west as ‘signalling the Birth of Modernity and the beginnings of a truly universal sensibility’ (Subrahmanyam 1997: 749). But it was the advances in navigational techniques and geographical knowledge of the East – the achievements of generations of Chinese, South Asian, and Muslim seafarers, geographers, astronomers, and cartographers – that made them possible.¹³ And it was not modernity that motivated Columbus on his westward voyage, but millenarianism, ‘a view of the world which had as much in common with Franciscan apocalyptic thought of the medieval period as with Copernicus’ (Subrahmanyam 1997: 749). The dynamism said to have led to the European discovery of the Americas, is also said to have driven the global networks of trade that linked up the world for the first time. However, the emergence of global trade was based, not on European initiatives, but on a worldwide silver trade driven by Chinese demand.

The European revolutions

According to conventional European historiography, the foundations of modernity were laid by revolutionary transformations in Europe that occurre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Preface
• 1. Global development
• 2. The origins and development of capitalism
• 3. Industrialization and the expansion of capital: core and periphery redefined
• 4. City states and nationalism
• 5. The imperial ‘historic bloc’ of the nineteenth century
• 6. The system unravels: contraction, conflict and social revolution
• 7. The post-World War II interregnum
• 8. Globalization redux
• Notes
• References
• Index